(1) Field of Invention
This invention relates to multi-media information systems. More particularly, the invention relates to multi-media information systems which enable tracking of information about a user's intentions, preferences and attitudes in a rich media presentation.
(2) Background Discussion
With the advent of push technology, i.e. where you allow a provider to send you content without your having specifically identified the content, tracking of user interactions with the delivered contents for statistical and inference deriving purposes is widely practiced. Many server technologies for gathering and managing knowledge exist today. When the delivered content takes the shape of rich media, i.e. content containing still images, animated images, video images, audio, etc., the user interaction space however becomes much larger and more complex since a whole variety of concepts and ideas can be expressed through interactive rich media. Consequently, the user intentions, preferences and attitudes that can be tracked in rich media interaction forms a much larger set. What is needed in the art is a tracking system with the following characteristics:
a) a tracking framework that considerably expands the scope of information that can be tracked.
b) tracking of both information which is statically inserted into content as well as information that is dynamically computed at the client.
c) individual specification and customizability of information to be tracked at the time of content creation for every tracking context.
d) choice of a subset of information to be tracked out of the set specified at the time of content creation, as per the goals of a campaign or preferences of a tracking server.
e) seamless interfacing with multiple tracking servers requiring neither changes to server code or changes to content.
f) specification of communication priority of each tracked information segment and clustering in time (wherever possible) of information transmitted back to a tracking server so as to optimize the number of server connections for tracking.
g) specification of tracking disablement for the content.